Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/329

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Chap. III.]
of Cell-membrane in Plants.
309

at present possess. Especially important were his researches into the origination and true form of stomata (1838 and 1856), and into the cuticle and its relation to the epidermis (1842 and 1845). He brought entirely new facts to light by his study of the development of cork and the outer bark in 1836; these tissues had scarcely been examined with care till then, and their formation and relation to the epidermis and the cortical tissue were quite unknown. In the latter treatise, one of his best, the difference between the suberous periderm and the true epidermis was first shown, the various forms of the periderm were described, and the remarkable fact established that the scaling of the bark was due to the formation of fine laminae of cork, which, penetrating gradually into the substance of the cortex, withdraw more and more of it from its connection with the rest of the living tissue, and as they die off form by their accumulation a rugged crust, which is the outer bark surrounding most thick-stemmed trees. The investigation was so thorough and comprehensive, that later observers, Sanio especially in 1860, could only add to it some more delicate features in the history of the process. In the same year appeared his enquiry into the lenticels, where von Mohl however overlooked what Unger discovered at the same time ('Flora,' 1836), namely, that these forms arise beneath the stomata; but he at once corrected Unger's hazardous supposition that the lenticels are similar forms to the heaps of gemmae on the leaves of the Jungermannieae. Unger, for his part, was not long in adopting von Mohl's explanation of the lenticels as local cork-formations.

Since von Mohl thus distinctly brought out the special character of the vascular bundles and of the different forms of epidermal tissues, it must excite surprise that he, like former phytotomists, did not find himself under the necessity of framing some conception of the rest of the tissue-masses in their peculiar grouping as a whole, as a special system, and of classifying and suitably naming the different forms that compose them, though his